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Comment by xcklo | Hacker News Reader

Many places outside of big cities are depopulating, have few decent jobs and services, and are still pretty expensive. If you are from the areas, have a family or an already decent career it might work, but for the majority it isn't a solution. And if people would actually would start moving somewhere else instead the same things would happens there.

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> if people would actually would start moving somewhere else instead the same things would happens there.

Not really. Unless everyone moves to the same place. We need to diversify from London. Having everything centred there is madness.

It would probably in many places though. The reason cities like London are more "successful" these days despite being completely unsuitable for modern industries at face value is because they can handle the growth. Adding a couple a thousand people is a rounding error in big cities, but would be the entire liquid housing market in smaller ones. Maybe you are right, maybe people just aren't aware. But it doesn't seem like the most obvious explanation. People, including Britons, have been moving to Berlin for decades now in search of more affordable living.

Edit: I am being rate limited so I will respond here instead.

> Except for the lack of affordable housing?

Sort of. Affordable housing is more a problem of uneven distribution of opportunities than costs as such. If you are part of those who do get to take part in those opportunities this is less of a problem since you are effectively in the same situation as living in a richer country. Of course you also miss out on opportunities that would be enabled by affordable housing, and a lower cost of living. But since most more affordable location can't take advantage of that as their own cost of housing is usually relative to their local opportunities it becomes a game of who is the biggest which large companies in large cities win.

> ...because they can handle the growth.

Except for the lack of affordable housing?

On the US side, I've learned that the infrastucture for each industry is clustered in specific cities.

If you want to participate in that industry, you need to live in one of those cities or have the luxury caveat of remote workability.

Want to work in tech? Good luck buying a house for cheap - anywhere that property values are languishing will not have useable broadband internet providers.

Got a chemistry degree? There's a short list of cities to move to, where you specialize in either medicine or petrochemical plastics. The option to do either rarely exists in a single city.

There are still a lot of places in the UK outside of London that have plenty of jobs and are far more affordable.

I live in Nottingham. There are tonnes of tech jobs here in the Midlands, and housing is quite affordable.

And yet the tech scene in Leicester is awful in comparison :(

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